If you only eat pesto in moderation and preferably make it yourself from high-quality ingredients, it can be part of a healthy diet without hesitation. However, if the pesto comes from a shop, it often contains more sugar and salt than necessary. We explain what you should look out for.
Can spaghetti with pesto actually be considered a healthy dish? Not as a sole source of nutrition, but under the right conditions it can. After all, pasta provides carbohydrates and protein. Wholemeal pasta, which has better nutritional values, is particularly recommended.
And what about pesto? What nutrients and calorie values does the green or red sauce have to offer? We took a closer look for you.
THE RIGHT OIL MAKES IT HEALTHIER
Pesto is actually an obvious case: if you read through the list of ingredients of a classic “Pesto alla Genovese”, you won’t find anything that would put a nutritionist to sleep. It contains: a lot of oil (olive oil or other vegetable oil), followed by basil, nuts or seeds, hard cheese (usually Parmesan) and spices such as salt, garlic and pepper.
If you make your own pesto, you basically use the same ingredients. They are mixed together and chopped until the familiar, aromatic paste is obtained.
Whether bought or not: how healthy a specific pesto turns out depends largely on how fresh and high-quality the ingredients are that find their way into the jar. Of course, you have the best control over the composition and preparation if you make your own pesto from fresh ingredients.
It is best to use fresh herbs or vegetables, fresh nuts, little salt, no sugar and rapeseed, walnut or olive oil. These three oils are considered to be of higher quality than others because they contain more unsaturated fatty acids and antioxidants.
In contrast, it is noticeable that many commercial pestos are based on cheaper oils such as sunflower oil. They also often contain more than 1.5 g of salt per 100 g of pesto (which puts them in the “high salt” category) and sugar is often added to them.
To make it clearer: If the nutritional values of store-bought pesto were calculated in the form of the Nutri-Score, many supermarket pestos from Barilla & Co. would only receive a grade of D. Whether the pesto is green or red makes no difference here.
IT NEEDS VEGETABLES
If you make your own pesto as described above – with a recommended oil, little salt and no sugar – you can at least achieve a Nutri-Score B. An A score is not possible. This is because every pesto contains oil and every oil contains saturated fatty acids, which are counted negatively when calculating the Nutri-Score.
And of course, because it is very oily, pesto also has a high calorific value and therefore many calories. This can be a problem if you are already consuming too many calories.
Pesto has around twice as many calories as a comparable amount of carbonara sauce, four times as many calories as bolognese sauce and eight times as many as a simple tomato sauce. However, these figures are more or less balanced out when you consider that pesto is normally served with much less pasta than tomato sauce, for example.
THE BOTTOM LINE
What does this all mean in summary? When it comes to ingredients, pesto from the supermarket is usually neither very healthy nor very unhealthy. At least when it is consumed in normal quantities and not spooned straight from the jar. Homemade pesto performs better, but even here you shouldn’t eat it by the spoonful every day.
Another decisive factor is where the pesto is applied. Anyone who is familiar with healthy eating knows that the plate should be as colorful as possible. The good news is that two portions of vegetables and wholemeal pasta with pesto rosso or pesto verde make a pretty healthy dish. Fresh broccoli, peas, cherry tomatoes, spinach, zucchinis or roasted peppers, for example, go well with pasta with pesto.
Our basic advice is that it makes less sense to look at individual products – in this case pesto – and ask yourself how healthy or unhealthy they are. It is better to keep an eye on the individual weekly balance. In other words, ask yourself: is there enough colorful and healthy food on the table overall? Do you eat legumes and nuts more often? And less sweet, salty and fatty foods? Do you also get enough exercise and sleep? If you can answer all of these questions in the affirmative, you can also try pesto.
